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Can’t Sleep? Here’s What to Do
This entry was posted on March 3, 2015.
We’ve all spent our fair share of nights lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, wishing that we could just fall asleep. The general response to not being able to doze off is to toss and turn and stare at the clock, wishing for sleep to come, and as it turns out that is the exact wrong thing for us to be doing. Dr. Michael Grandner of the Behavioral Sleep Medicine Program at the University of Pennsylvania says hat the longer we stay in bed and try to win the fight, the more we are setting ourselves up for a vicious cycle that could potentially go on well past one or two nights, leading to a full blown case of insomnia.
According to Grandner, “The more time we spend in bed awake, not sleeping, the more it drives home the message to our brain and to our body that the bed is the place for tossing and turning. You end up programming yourself to be awake.” Grandner explains that if you are a person who feels themself getting sleepy, only to find that once you’ve climbed into bed you suddenly feel more alert and unable to fall asleep, it may be a result having fought insomnia in bed instead of getting up and getting yourself out of the environment. Grandner says, “Once you’ve hit 20, 30 minutes – maybe a little more, depending on who you are – you’ve gotten to the point where that sleep is not happening. It’s best to just get out of bed, so something else for a little bit.”
Something else? Like what? According to Grandner, there are a few no-no’s in terms of the options that you choose. What is really important is that you choose an out-of-bed activity that isn’t going to suck you in for ore than half an hour or so, because you need to be able to get back to bed. You also want to make sure that you don’t use the time to check work email or work on a project, and make sure that you don’t turn on any bright lights because they will trigger your brain into thinking that it’s tie to wake up.
When you get up out of bed, it is not surrendering to not sleeping. Rather it is taking a break from your bed and quitting on the fight so that you can return to bed when you start feeling drowsy. Talking about battling sleeplessness in bed, Grandner says, “The more you chase after it, the further away it’s going to get. What you need to do is let that anxiety go. Let that stress go. If anything, you’ll end up sleeping more in the long run… because you’re going to be programming your [brain] that the bed is for sleep, not for wake.”
